PERENNIALS > LAMPROCAPNOS > PRUNING
Dicentra spectabilis, also known as bleeding hearts, is one of those plants which can, once planted in your garden, simply be left to its own devices.
You are viewing: When To Cut Back Bleeding Hearts
It is a great choice for a low-maintenance garden, as it will not require much care and attention from you at all.
It should, with little effort, provide you with a display of pretty, heart-shaped flowers with little white drops underneath year after year.
Bleeding hearts will form only relatively small clumps, even after a number of years.
Therefore, it will not require pruning, nor will it need to be divided every few years, like so many other herbaceous perennials do, to ease overcrowding and congestion.
However, if you want to keep your garden beds in check, you can if you wish:
- Deadhead individual spent dicentra flowers and their stems while the plant is in bloom.
- Prune back dicentra plants completely during the autumn months.
Read on for more detail about each of these two options.
When To Prune Lamprocapnos
You do not really need to deadhead or cut back dicentras, however, many gardeners will choose to do so in order to keep their gardens looking neat.
It is important to understand that you do need to cut back at the right time and in the right way in order to avoid derailing the lifecycle of this perennial plant.
If you decide to deadhead, do so by removing only spent flowers, during the blooming period between April and June.
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It is important to leave all the foliage in place until it begins to naturally die back in late autumn.
In order to understand this, you need to understand the lifecycle of this plant.
These are rhizomatous herbaceous perennials, meaning that each spring, they grow foliage and then flower.
If left alone, the flowers will go to seed and then the above-ground growth will begin to die back.
After flowering and before the foliage dies back, the plant’s foliage remains green for some time and gathers energy which will be stored in the rhizomatous roots through the winter months.
If you cut back the foliage after flowering while it is still green, it will not be able to gather the energy it needs and the plant will be weaker and smaller the following spring.
So, it is important to wait until the foliage has done its job before you cut it back, if you choose to do so at all.
1) Deadheading (Optional)
Some gardeners choose to deadhead bleeding hearts in order to focus the plant on producing flowers rather than seed production.
However, deadheading will not usually prolong the flowering period for these plants.
The main reason, therefore, that people choose to deadhead dicentra is to avoid unsightly spent flowers and seed pods after the flowers fade.
This is a rather laborious and thankless task, as you would have to remove individual spent flowers from a stem one at a time, and then, once all the flowers of a stem are spent, remove the stem to around 10cm above the ground.
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I do not recommend this, since there really is no point beyond aesthetics.
Also, by leaving the plants to go to seed, you could collect the seeds and take on the rather challenging task of sowing dicentras to increase your plant stock, which could be an interesting thing to try.
2) Cutting Back (Optional)
Once the foliage of this herbaceous perennial begins to die back in late autumn, the second optional pruning task involves cutting back all above-ground growth to just above ground level.
Again, this really would only be for aesthetic reasons and to keep your garden looking neat and tidy.
We recommend that you consider leaving dead herbaceous perennial foliage and stems in place over the winter months.
As it begins to break down, a range of wildlife can benefit from the shelter and habitat dicentras and other herbaceous perennial plants afford.
Letting it die back naturally also returns the nutrients it contains to the soil, without the intermediary stop of your composting system.
“Cutting die back on perennials used to be a routine autumn or winter gardening task for putting the garden to bed,” Master Horticulturist Colin Skelly says.
“That is, making beds and borders neat and tidy prior to growth recommencing in spring.
“This approach has been superseded by delaying cutting back until late winter or leaving dead material on the ground to rot down.
“I leave perennials to die back naturally but then add a layer of compost in early spring to neaten up the garden and provide a dark contrast to spring bulbs and early perennials.”
Source: https://t-tees.com
Category: WHEN
